Comment by breck
13 years ago
Keep in mind that our news media reports only the facts that fit their story of "NK is evil" and don't report any facts to the contrary. I assure you without a doubt it's a lot better place than our media makes it seem. Sure, their undemocratic system of government is a bad one, it's a CVS system when the rest of the world has moved to Git, and they will be A LOT better off when they switch, but the place has a lot of good going for it, and the reports we see are almost always chosen not for their objective value but to support the one sided argument that our media has been telling for years.
To point to a specific example, yesterday I watched George Stephanopoulos interview Dennis Rodman after Rodman's NK trip and George made some comment about the human rights record and to back it up he mentioned that NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.
NK has a bad system of government. Their human rights record leaves much to be desired. But so does the human rights record of every country on earth, including the US.
If you ever bother to read about any of these accounts, they are all practically cookie-cutter. NK visits are practically on rails. It's not definitive proof of anything, but neither is the lack of visits to NK producing 'smoking gun' photos from prison camps.
1. The US doesn't throw entire families in jail to punish the actions of a single person.
2. Your logic about the numbers doesn't take into account the portion of the population. The US is a lot larger than North Korea. If we translate those numbers into percentages, North Korea has 0.81% of the population in prison, and the U.S. has 0.69% of the population in prison.
3. As bad as the US prison system is, I don't think that it's reach GULAG / Auschwitz levels, which by all accounts NK has.
That's like saying that GW Bush started a war in Iraq. Hitler started a war in Europe. They both started wars, therefore GW Bush == Hitler! My logic wins!
[ Note: Nobody wanted to believe that the Holocaust was real in Germany until the troops started liberating the camps. IIRC, there were rumors, but most people basically said what you are saying, though there was probably more out of disbelief that human beings could do such a thing. ]
You have some very good points.
Brief note: Rodman's trip was very different than most NK trips. He spent a lot of direct time with Un.
#1) Good point. I don't know anything about who gets sent to the prison camps in NK.
#2) 1/31 of the U.S. adult population is in prison, which is higher than 0.69%. If you were a black male, that number shoots up to 9%. If you were playing the ovarian lottery and wanted to optimize for not being in prison and could choose between NK and being a black male in the U.S., you should choose the former.
#3) Good point. I don't know anything about the prison camps in NK.
In general my point is, don't make decisions based on facts provided by homogenous sources. Gather your own sources, see things first hand, and make judgements and decisions based on your own findings. If you make decisions based on data provided by a single source (in this case the U.S media), you aren't making decisions at all--they've already been made for you.
Regarding #2, if I were somehow forced to choose between being in an American prison and living in North Korea, not in prison, I'd have to sit down and do some serious thinking and research before I could make a decision.
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>Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.
The US also has 13 times the population. And conditions in US prisons are not comparable to conditions in North Korean prisons.
Bull. Shit.
North Korea is a totalitarian hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of citizens for 6 decades.
And the entire western hemisphere is an imperialist hell hole where there has been an ongoing holocaust of (native/indigenous) citizens for 6 centuries.
Ah yes Dennis Rodman is such a reliable source of information. He has to suck up to low life dictators. He's broke as shit! At this point Rodman is hoping to be anyone's lapdog just for rent money. There are people in prison camps for things their grandfathers did in North Korea. At least the people in the US had a trial by their peers for something they were actually were accused of doing.
I like that Dennis Rodman does what he does. He lives on the outskirts of our norms and enriches all of our lives by pushing the limits and exploring our options.
It just reminds me of Sean Penn kicking it with Saddam Hussein and trying to tell the US about how everything was cool and kosher in Iraq (just prior to the US invasion). Do you really think that if something bad is going on that a foreign dictator is going to openly admit to crimes against humanity just because some US celebrity shows up on their doorstep?
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Entertainment is one thing, diplomacy is completely another.
If North Korea has a lot of good going for it, I'm sure you can give us a few examples.
For sure. (And if you're curious there are some great sources online including one interesting account recently was Eric Schmidt's daughter's blog.)
- Millions of people who have families and I'm sure are pretty happy even if their government sucks. And this is all that really matters at the end of the day.
- Those wide streets look pretty darn cool
- People look healthy (compared to obesity in the U.S.)
- Those massive games they hold each year are pretty impressive
- I'm impressed they figured out how to engineer an n bomb (not happy about it, but impressed)
- I'm impressed they figured out how to get a device in orbit
- Hosting the pirate bay
- Seems like they have a decent subway system, which most countries don't have
- I thought it was really neat that when the power goes out in the subways, everyone is prepared with a flashlight. Smart populace!
Let me also be clear, I think the government of NK sucks! Like, they get the basics wrong. Very wrong. Democracy, capitalism, those things have proven themselves as far superior than their system, imo.
But I don't think there's some dramatic struggle between good and evil going on here. I think in reality it's a lot more practical.
I honestly cannot tell if this is satire or if you think these are actually legitimate points.
Or you could just look at it as, "this happens so often that the people expect it, and are not complete idiots."
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NK has 200,000 folks in prison camps. Based on that logic, the U.S. is 10x worse with 2.2 million people in prison right now.
Per capita calculations or it is meaningless.
Exactly! That was the problem with GS' argument. He didn't compare per capita.